Atomic City by Windstorm Studios - Developer Interview

Click the image to get your copy of Atomic City.

Dusty: Glad to meet you, I’m Dusty.

Jon: Good to meet you, I’m Jon. So let’s get started here. So the first question is how would you describe Atomic City to a new player?

Dusty: Atomic City Adventures is a retro futuristic sci-fi action game. It’s a single player, it’s a 3rd person game, it’s the kind of game you play a hero and you go out in this future, the kind of future we all dreamed of back in the 50’s and 60’s were you have flying cars but all the flying cars look like 57 Chevy’s. And you get a chance to go out there and battle mobsters, and gangsters, and villainess robots, and a huge part of the game play is sort of flying around on these flying jet bikes and flying cars. But it is very much a Teen rated you know almost family friendly game. It really is about going out and blowing things up and being the good guy.

Jon: Yeah, the style kind of reminded me of the Meet the Robinsons with The Incredibles mixed in.

Dusty: Yeah Yeah, there ya go.

Jon: So what was the development process like?

Dusty: Well, frantic.

Both: laughs

Dusty: Long. Basically when I quit, when I was laid off from Ensemble in late 2008 early 2009. I started building a prototype for an MMO at that time. I spent 6 months putting together this prototype, shipped it around to various publishers. Couldn’t get anybody to really bite off on the notion of a single man company or funding a company to build a team to build this prototype. So at that point, right around October or right around November, December 2009. I set about creating a single player game what I thought was a modest scope that would take about 11 months for production and 24 months later the game was finished. So but that was basically a set, once I couldn’t shop the MMO, or convinced the MMO wasen’t going to go. I really wanted to create a single player game. And worked full time, pretty much 5 days a week and then 7 days a week for the latter half of the development process. Getting this thing out the door.

Jon: So if this was going to be an MMO, how would it be different from how it is now?

Dusty: Actually the first thing is a connection to the single player game had a whole lot of the MMO vestiges in it. And it was a pretty significantly different game in it; it had a whole lot more RPG elements in it. The original incarnation of both the MMO and the single player game that I originally designed it. Was that you had different talent trees based on your weapons specialization. So you would have a blaster talent tree, or a missile talent tree, or plasma talent tree. You would level up your character, you would gain all these additional types of abilities you could use with these weapons and with the vehicles. I had a one at one time the classic Death Blossom ability for the plasma specialization tree where you hit one key and your vehicle rotates 360 degrees in all these different angles while you fire plasma blasts in all directions destroying all your enemies around you.

Jon: Nice!

Dusty: So it was originally developed as a light RPG, RPG game with these action elements into it. And I still think that even as an MMO that design was a really really good design. For building something that was familiar and yet also, distinctly different when you add in the physics of flying a vehicle around that you typically don’t have in an MMO. But you know one of the other things that this presented a problem with was once I got the design sort of working, and started testing it with some of my peers. I realized as a single player game all the MMO elements really weren’t working, they weren’t just very fun. And I mentioned this in one of my blog posts online, but I given the player a gun and told that him he didn’t shoot he pressed ability buttons to fire the gun. And I put him on a vehicle and told him he didn’t really shoot guns on the vehicle, he pressed abilities to cause the vehicle to use its guns. And that mechanic didn’t really fly with people who were used to just use to pressing down a button till something fell down dead. So it was a pretty significant design change about half way through the process to go from a MMO like single player game to go to a true action oriented third person game.

Jon: What was your inspiration for Atomic City?

Dusty: So inspiration came from a lot of places. When I was first building the MMO, I was playing a lot of City of Hero’s and you can see some of the influence in Atomic City. One of the cool things in the original game you start off on foot as a superhero and blast things. So I thought it was kind of ridiculous that you can’t even jump in a car. But after you’ve played for a while and at that time it was like 14 levels before you got your first flight power. But once you got that first travel power the whole city, the whole world opened up to you. And so an extraordinary satisfactory feeling came over you because you’ve been running around the city for such a long time. Then suddenly you can leap building to building and fly throughout the buildings. And everybody I knew that played that game really enjoyed that transition. It really resonated with them and resonated with me. So I wanted to recapture that transition in a non-superhero kind of way. So I wanted to make the avatar a still very important forefront. Always wanted you to drive a character and not a vehicle. But I wanted you to have a gratifying and same sort of cool vertigo inducing moments where you swoop through building and down cliffs. So that’s where it came to a person on a jet bike on a flying jet bike or hover bike and you felt like a person on a vehicle and have those cool moments.

Jon: Yeah I had a lot of fun just flying around most of the time.

Dusty: I get that from a lot of people. Once they get familiar with the controls, and there is a little ramp up once you get on the flying vehicle. Once people do that they enjoy just cruising around the city and go down side alleys. One of my few regrets is that I didn’t have more money and time to build more stuff for people find and do. Because I do think that aspect of the game really resonated with people.

Jon: Yeah there was time where I had my main mission complete and I would spend about an hour finding all the collectables and side missions.

Dusty: Outstanding! Yeah and that’s why all that kind of content was added to the game. Was for that sole purpose to kind of give people, and I added a lot of you know mobs that didn’t tie into mission and that gives people more time to spend in the level and collect the crates.

Jon: This one is kind of funny, your about page said you had your family do the QA testing. How did that go?

Dusty: I did in fact. No please understand my family didn’t do all the testing. In fact once the game got close to its first alpha testing, I had a bunch of my friends who are also professional game developers to do some of the alpha and beta testing. And I learned an extraordinary amount out of that, and made some changes to the game based on their input and feedback. But just today, my son is now 15 and was 12 when I started developing this game; my daughter was 10 and is now 13; and my wife is a non-gamer. And all three of them provided a different feedback into the game. My son is the classic teenage hardcore gamer. You know gave me a lot of feedback or “this just isn’t fun” or “I can’t do this.” My wife as a non-gamer gave was great for feedback as in terms of “I don’t know where to go here, what to do” you know “you need to add a reticle” well she wouldn’t say that she would just tell me, “I don’t know what to do here.” And I would have to come up with ways to make this more appealing or intuitive in terms of providing information. And my daughter you know has the same kind of feedback from a lot of people like you said just enjoyed getting on the vehicle and flying around. So it was important that she was able to do that. She could you just start the mission, hop on the vehicle and take off, and she was a good barometer on how complicated I was making the controls if she couldn’t fly the vehicles around.



Jon: Yeah I could never get my wife to do any QA testing for any game I would make.

Both: laughs

Dusty: Right, it’s a tough thing and even then you have to take the feedback within the context that’s given to you. Ok, if that person really doesn’t know how to do that but is it important that I reach that level of feedback to satisfy the game. Of course everything is a tradeoff, everything is a tradeoff of how much time and money I have VS the value I’m going to get out of doing that.

Jon: What software tools did you use to create the game?

Dusty: Well of course I built it on the Torque engine. I originally selected the Torque engine out of the desire to do a rapid prototype for the MMO. I really like Torque’s prototyping capabilities and I had just come from Ensemble and we were using the Unreal 3 engine at that time. Full blown, full license, professional/developer license. And I had extensive usage of that license and I was amazed even then how much easier it was to get things working in Torque. So that was a huge decider at that point. So Torque has the full engine and all the source, and it was only a hundred bucks. So beyond Torque there were two main tools that I recommend to everybody else building a world based game. And one is the Arcane Effects Tool Set. The Arcane Effects became the foundation behind my ability system and my ability system basically became the foundation over everything I did in the game beyond running. So all the firing effects, all the vehicle effects, the various rockets, the missiles, the plasma effects were all built inside Arcane Effects library set of effects. And to be honest before I license Arcane Effects, I had started building my own ability system. And I have a pretty significant background to build my own; we were working on an MMO back at Ensemble that did basically the same thing. But I found that Arcane Effects structure to vastly superior and robust compared to what I had intended to build and was going to build. There was so much there that I could take advantage of. So if you’re building an MMO, RPG, or any kind of world based game, the Arcane Effects system is just invaluable to put in there for the amount of money it costs. And the other one is Torsion, I started by putting all my scripts in my Visual Studio project so I could at least jump from source file to source file. But once I installed Torsion and was able to get symbolic debugging at the script level, there is absolutely no way I will build any other Torque project without it. And again it’s an apples and oranges thing, at that time Unreal 3 didn’t even have a good debugger for their scripting system. I mean having Torsion was a level above in terms of being able to debug your project compared to what Unreal 3 provided at that point. So you can’t underestimate and I can’t overstate how important Torsion is for your project.

Jon: Describe some of your biggest technical hurdles you had and how you overcame them?

Dusty: The technical hurdles were not the biggest to overcome in building the game. The actual biggest hurdles I had to overcome were the design hurdle that was stripping all the RPG mechanics in which I had already invested months of development in. And retool the game into a third person action shooter. That was more in line with what people expectations would be when they sit down and play the game. That was probably the hardest decision I had to make. And there was no getting around it; it was just a matter of do I extend the amount of time I spend building this game for another six months in order to do this. I think it was a right decision in the end, but it was a hard decision in the end. In terms of technical hurdles there were two. The one is vehicle collision in Torque is still pretty poor, it’s something that I basically put off for as long as I could. And I have even followed the community sites and spend a lot of time trying to fix the vehicle penetrations. And because GarageGames, during the development of my game was in a transition phase and the PhysX stuff hadn’t really come online yet. And there was always this, once we get PhysX fully integrated we are going to integrate their vehicle system and so, the vehicle system that was left over from the Tribes days. It was pretty much left stand pat. And there were a lot of problems with that, and it ultimately; what I mostly did was designing around those problems instead of fixing those problems. I could never completely fix vehicles getting stuck on objects which I would have loved to of done. I made it really easy for the player to reset the vehicle and know that I could prevent everything for the player to have a frustration when the vehicle got stuck. Outside of the vehicle collision, and for those people reading the interview, and are like “what the hell, we are going to call this guy up!” But um, the vehicle system is very robust and was another deciding factors in using Torque. Is that it came with it out of the bag with a ready to go solution for hover vehicles, flying vehicles, and driving vehicles and nobody else had that! Everyone else you had to incorporate an SDK. The other thing was performance in general. And this due to the nature of my game design, I wanted to have very large open cities. Well it’s just about the most un-performance friendly design you can possibly imagine. Well you first start off on foot and you wanted it to feel all very large in scale compared to you, then once you get on a flying vehicle, you’re zooming around the city and how do you scale that up and still feel real to the player? Well you build honest goodness 2K by 2K city zones full of all of the accouterments that you would find in a city. And then making that perform well on a laptop based GPU chip. The way I solved that one was with extraordinary aggressive LOD’s, perhaps overly so. But I read up on some of Tom Spilman’s stuff originally about building 0 Level LOD’s. Where the objects clip completely out of the plane once they reach that 0 level LOD. And all of our city furniture, and everything in the game has a 0 level LOD, that our artist went back and made sure it worked. So everything just leaves the scene entirely.

Jon: Are you doing any trials of Atomic City?

Dusty: Not at this point although I am seriously considering it. Originally when I released the game it was a $9.99 preorder and $14.99 purchase. And I’m thinking, you know its fifteen bucks and it hardly seems that you would need to download a demo of the game to decide to buy it. We make a decision to go to bad movies all the time that costs more than fifteen bucks. So it doesn’t seem like a terrible big investment to try the game even if you didn’t like it. But I’m getting a lot of feedback from people, that increasingly that the price that people want to pay for a quality game keeps going down. People are really wanting to try out a game before they buy it. So right now I’m integrating the game into 1.1 final and once I’m done with that then I will release some small information stuff about the game and maybe a small trial of it. The hard part is maintaining the story of the game in the trial.

Jon: So you worked for Ensemble, how does it compare? Working for a big named publisher vs. indie?

Dusty: It’s like everything it’s a double edged sword. There are some huge benefits, but if you work for a studio of significant size that there are some days you just struggle to get something productive done. There are so many meetings and so many interruptions on your time and you feel like you’re being pulled so many different ways. And as a coder, programmer, and guy who makes codes it feels extraordinary liberating to sit down at your desk at 8 o’clock in the morning and crank the crap out of code until 8 o’clock at night and feel like you got a huge amount of work done. Which is one of the reasons I went indie in the first place, and it is extremely satisfying. The downside to that is you get from a company; you get less feedback, less information from your peers and you lose some of the benefits to building a cool game. And that I’ve discovered in the past two years, that is a pretty significant value in itself. I definitely some things I would do different but I would not take back the past two years.

Jon: So why retro meets future?

Dusty: So back when I first visions of it was going to be a post-apocalyptic future where the world had been broken into giant chunks and shards. And you would fly these jet bikes from shard to shard, it was very much like Skyland if your familiar with that short lived anime. But um, just about that time Burning Crusade came out for WoW and guess what Burning Crusade had, tons of giant floating continents. And suddenly everything you saw was all floating continents. Every vision I had of my game looked just about like every other sci-fi MMO you’ve seen. Which is large expanses of normal looking terrain because it’s easy to build with a few structures scattered about, and you zipping over the terrain killing things. And it just seemed so generic to me and I wanted to take it somewhere new. But at that time I was playing Mirrors Edge, and for all of its warts, it was a game that when you saw a screen shot from Mirrors Edge you were like, “holy crap, I know exactly where that screenshot comes from, I recognize that game instantly.” And I was talking to some of my artist friends and we started thinking I really wanted something more in a city and have a sci-fi feel to it. And I don’t remember where it came from but I had a Jetson’s style rail gun concept and it just took off from there. What about retro future? What if we combine these elements from the future that we dreamed about that we would have back in the 60’s which is a whole different future we dream about now. So the more I fell in love with it, I talked about it to anyone else about it they’re like, “Ah that would be so awesome!” Of course even now, retro future is becoming a new art style. But back in 2008, I was like that would be awesome nobody has done anything like that. And if you see a screenshot from Atomic City, you pretty much recognize that it’s from Atomic City and not some other third person game.

Jon: Yeah I love when you open the game or on a loading screen, those screens are just beautiful.

Dusty: Yeah that guy did a really really great job of combining elements from the game and painting them up to a concept that looked great.


Jon: So there are 7 levels with side missions and tons of collectables. Any plans for DLC?

Dusty: Yes! Definitely, the original game was going to be 10 levels and there are 3 zones that never got built due to time, but I have all the assets for them. So at some point I would like to release a Director’s Cut that will incorporate them. But even before then, I have some gameplay enhancements that I’m going to add to the game. One of them that I can talk about is a Hoop Race. One of the elements in the game is you can get points for going through the hoops in the game and collect points. And if you notice is the hoops are in a game now are definitely in a course. The hoops are designed that if you pick up the hoop closest to the VSF Entrance, from that hoop you can follow a distinctive course throughout the entire zone. Which was done intentionally because I really want you to get in the rhythm and flow of moving through the hoops. And I wanted to add a gameplay mode that was out of the story mode to let you go back and visit those missions and get a timing on how fast you can execute the hoop course and post it up on Facebook or Twitter or something like that so you can share it with your friends.

Jon: Yeah I had a lot of fun flying around in those hoops. I think it was level 5 or 6 where you need to destroy the military bases, I just went around flying through the hoops for fun.

Dusty: Right, right. It kind of detracts from the mission, especially if you do it at the beginning of the mission you will have 5, 10, or 15 mobs and Agents following you around the zone. But I want to create a whole mode where you enter the mission and you get a timing of how fast you can complete the hoop zone.

Jon: Yeah that’s one thing I did was see how many hoops I could get through with everyone firing at me before I died.

Dusty: Laughs



Jon: If you had to do it all over again, what would you change about creating this game?

Dusty: The biggest one is to try a lot harder to get others to come on board with me and to start this company with at least one other person or two other people. When I first started this company I talked with a few of my friends from Ensemble that were also laid off. And I pitched the idea of the MMO to them and they weren’t really keen on that idea, and I really didn’t push it too hard. I didn’t expect the amount of risk others were willing to take. And looking back, I should have been willing to sacrifice some of my hardcore vision to have someone come onboard with me. Not to put down anyone out there in the building a game alone, it is a crazy tough thing that isn’t an iPhone game that’s a three month project. I can’t overstate how much work it is even if you have one or two other people to handle marketing or art integration it would make a huge difference.

Jon: So last question, will Greer ever get with Agent Rogers if you do a sequel?

Dusty: Laughs, I’m glad to see that Greer’s infatuation for Agent Rogers hasen’t been lost on the casual observer. The guy for the Geer’s voice over will also enjoy hearing that. I’m pretty sure Greer’s is a little out of Agent Rogers league. But if things go according to plan and Atomic City is successful enough that I can build the next case, my plans are to build some new characters that may catch Greer’s eyes that will be a little bit more compatible.

Jon: Well Dusty, I want to thank you for taking time with me to do this interview with you.

Dusty: Well I appreciate you guys taking the time play the game and doing the interview while everyone's crazy busy over there.

Jon: Yeah, well it was a lot of fun for me, but you take care.

Dusty: You do the same.

You can download Atomic City at Direct2Drive for $14.99